So, you remember how you used to pass around chits during the class to communicate effectively? Yeah well, that’s essentially what Whisper is. It’s a platform where decentralised apps (DApps) can communicate with each other. Moreover, the ink being used in these chits fades away after some time. That means that each message over Whisper is transient in nature. The messages sent have topics associated with them and they’re delivered to DApps which have subscribed to that particular topic over that node. Whisper has an advantage over smart contracts in the sense that they don’t require “gas” (a token of currency) to be sent by the sender in order to get the message delivered. Small messages can be shared using whisper freely and the anonymity it offers is central to its nature. The nodes in-between don’t know about the communication happening between the sender and the receiver.

If you woke up in the morning and started scratching your head because you couldn’t understand the Bitcoin sell-offs the market was witnessing, we bet your first guess wasn’t a 3 Billion USD Chinese Ponzi scheme. Well, now you know better.

London-based bank and financial services firm Standard Chartered came out of the closet in support of Blockchain technology as it completed its first cross-border blockchain letter of credit transaction. This one is a first in the entire oil industry with Thai state-owned oil giant PTT Group.

Standard Chartered completed a pilot letter of credit (LC) transaction for PTT Group, PTT International Trading Pte Ltd and IRPC Public Company Limited using the Voltron (the coolest name you’ll read in this paragraph) blockchain platform. Oil companies are often reliant on letters of credit as a form of short-term trade finance. Obviously, if you’re using something which sounds cool and is controversial in different parts of the world, it’s normal to pay a small price.

“This process is paperwork-intensive and requires up to five days for the delivery of these documents.”

Remember how you finally convinced your grandfather to ditch the Walkman in favour of the iPod, well that’s what the finance sector has done with the US Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve Board is planning to release a real-time payments and settlements service in order to ease out the entire process in the absence of a better (*coughs* blockchain? *coughs*) system.

A press release published on Aug. 5 reads that the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has requested Federal Reserve Banks to develop a new interbank real-time settlement service to support faster payments in the U.S. The payment system is called FedNow (they totally missed the opportunity to call it FedUp) and will purportedly launch in 2023 or 2024.

Cryptocurrency exchange recently confirmed that someone tried to dip their dirty hands into the fourth biggest altcoin, Litecoin. The official Twitter handle claimed that a major attack against users of altcoin Litecoin took place. The firm made this claim in a tweet on Aug. 9:

Blockchain.com has announced that it is launching a new microsecond-latency crypto exchange called The Pit. If you thought that its name is related to some sort of complex security system and hence it is very “deep”, well you were wrong like us. If, however, you took into account the speed factor and connected it to the Pit stops of formula one races, well you’re smarter than us. That’s exactly where the name comes from. The institutional-grade platform will be launched in over 240 markets around the world, including a select number of U.S. states.

Just when you start losing hope in the Indian financial sector and related Indian government institutions, some organisation comes forward to make you feel worse by stating what the statesmen should already know. Industry body Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies) has opposed the recent proposal for banning cryptocurrencies in India, saying it is “not a solution”.Read more about NASSCOM stands against the crypto ban …

China is a country known to the West as one that bans all of its products and tries to develop them indigenously. It is considered to be one of the most important players in the cryptocurrency market. The decisions of the Chinese government affect the entire industry, but cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin have been in a dangerous position in terms of regulations. The existing Chinese cryptocurrency laws are pretty strict. Read more about China Takes a Favourable Turn on Cryptocurrency …

2018 turned out to be very problematic for all those who invested in cryptocurrencies as most of the cryptocurrencies underwent losses between 80 to 95% from their all-time highs.

That was a harsh lesson for amateur investors looking for easy profits, forcing a high number of them to quit the market as they were not able to handle any further losses. However, what happened to the cryptocurrencies in 2018 is no different than what happens in financial markets: a rapid price appreciation, inflating a bubble, which when it bursts, affects all stakeholders.

Now 2019 has come along and some people have decided to stay out of it following the 2018 punch. However, if you’re up for it, here is a list of cryptocurrencies you should watch out for in the remaining half of 2019.